Previously they stated, that any game (gift) which was bought in Steam Store will not have any regional restrictions to add to the library and play (it is well known that CD keys usually have various restrictions on activation and playing). Actually steam support still claims that gifts will not be region locked, but it is not true, there were several solid confirmations that restrictions exist.

Right now you should be aware of following gifts.

Max payne 3 Pre order 1 (CIS) – sub id 14524 The gift has following parameter in its cdr record:

onlyallowrunincountries = AM AZ BY GE KZ KG MD RU TJ TM UZ UA LV LT EE

which means it can not be runned outside CIS countries

Max payne 3 Pre order 1 (RU) – sub id 14623 with parameter

onlyallowrunincountries = RU

which means that it will be playable only inside Russia.

Also note, that there is another gift with the same name (Max payne 3 Pre order 1 (RU)), but different subscription id ([4] 14100). It is not locked, but Max Payne 1 & 2 form this gift will contain russian language pack ONLY. It was available to purchase in Russia till 12 of May. From this moment only restricted version (sub 14524) is available for Russians.

Other region locked gifts:

• Confrontation Russian (sub id 13915) (playable only in Russia)
• Ridge Racer Unbounded (RU) (sub id 13946) (playable only in Russia and CIS countries)
• The Witcher 2 (RU) (sub id 13944) (playable only in Russia and CIS countries). Note, that there is another gift with the same name and different sub id without any restrictions. It was available to buy in Russia and CIS till 27 of March.

Source: reddit

NOT cool Valve/publishers.

Join the Official Rockstar Games Community on Steam at http://steamcommunity.com/games/rockstargames by 10 am Pacific Time on Tuesday, May 15, 2012, and receive one non-giftable copy of Midnight Club 2 in your Steam account by May 29th.

Eligibility: User must have an account with at least one successful purchase, gift or retail registration in the account. The offer is not available to users who already own Midnight Club 2.

Patch for Windows Vista/Windows 7: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=730578

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

To celebrate they are giving away 20 of the best Epic tracks from their games over the years.  They’ve hand picked and remastered a soundtrack that includes everything from Jazz Jackrabbit to Unreal Tournament. There are even a few surprise tracks that have never before been released on our soundtrack!

Make sure to get the whole soundtrack and rock out to some retro video game tunes!

1. Unreleased Theme
Unreal Tournament 3
Rom Di Prisco (2007)

2. Dan
Jill of the Jungle
Dan Froelich (1992)

3. Main Theme
Unreal
Alexander Brandon/Michiel Van der Boss (1998)

4. Armored Prayer
Gears of War 2
Steve Jablonsky (2008)

5. Vault of Tears
Infinity Blade II
Josh Aker (2011)

6. Space
Epic Pinball
Robert Allen (1993)

7. Main Menu
Unreal Tournament
Alexander Brandon (1999)

8. Menu Song
Jazz Jackrabbit
Robert Allen (1994)

9. They’ll Be Coming For You Now
Infinity Blade
Josh Aker (2010)

10. Hope Runs Deep
Gears of War 2
Steve Jablonsky (2008)

11. Main Theme
Tyrian
Alexander Brandon (1995)

12. Hyperblast Redux
Unreal Tournament 2004
Kevin Riepl (2004)

13. Hanover’s Favorite Son
Gears of War 3
Steve Jablonsky (2011)

14. Main Theme
Shadow Complex
Josh Aker (2009)

15. 14 Years After E-Day
Gears of War
Kevin Riepl (2006)

16. Lockdown
Unreal Tournament 3
Jesper Kyd (2007)

17. Theme
Bulletstorm
Krzysztof Wierzynkiewicz/Michal Cielecki (2011)

18. Pull Back the Bass
Jazz Jackrabbit 2
Alexander Brandon (1998)

19. Transistor
Unreal Championship 2
Kevin Riepl (2005)

20. Finally A Tomorrow
Gears of War 3
Steve Jablosnky (2011)

Source: Epic Games

EA have put up a blog entry called, “Continuing the Origin Conversation”, or, “Please tell us what we’re doing wrong.” The post invites users to comment on their favourite Origin feature, as well as features they’d like to see added in the future.

The post has already attracted over 300 comments, from, “I would like a clock on the overlay so I can check the time easier while playing” to “Please add a feature to purchase and play EA games through Steam.” A live question-and-answer follow-up with Origin’s head honches Robert Kissinger and Mike Lewis will take place on Tuesday.

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell has previously voiced concerns about Origin, saying, “I don’t think they’re doing anything super well yet,” but going on to say that they’re “recognising what the challenges are” and “playing catch up.” He also reiterated that Valve is keen to have EA games back on their Steam digital distribution service.

Origin has attracted a lot of people last year with BF3 release and few others this year, they are also trying to improve their service everyday. They’re also keenly interested in PC gaming, as evidenced by their Indie Bundle.

Source: PC Gamer

Valve has confirmed to IGN that it will not be announcing any new projects at this year’s E3.

Previously, a great deal of speculation has surrounded the announcement of Half-Life 3, among other projects. The Half-Life franchise was last seen in 2007 with the release of Half-Life 2: Episode Two in The Orange Box.

At the moment, Valve is working on Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, both of which are currently in closed beta. In addition, new Portal 2 DLC is set to arrive in the coming weeks.

Source: IGN UK

No pre-loading? Not a problem anymore. Queue up your game at work and play when you get home. Same goes for being out of town for lets say future Steam holiday sales.

Here’s a screenshot of the remote installation progress:

While the recent news about the DLC outage finally ending for all users, it looks like another form of Rock Band may be coming to a more permanent end in the near future. Rock Band iOS app will “no longer be playable” after May 31st, according to an in-game pop up message when loading the app (see below).

Despite the impending fate of the app, there are no indications that a similar situation will be occurring with the more recent Rock Band Reloaded app.

They probably ran out of licensing time for some of the songs and had to disabled the app. This sucks hard though.

Source: reddit

Update:

WTF?

Lots of Steam on Linux news this week after Michael Larabel visited Valve office and confirmed Steam and Source Engine on Linux.

Now, in a Live QA session for Ubuntu 12.04 release, Ubuntu Developer and Community Manager Jono Bacon said that he knows Canonical has been in touch with Valve to ensure top notch support of Steam client on Ubuntu.

Check out the video, skip to 52:14 for Steam part:

Probably Canonical already had idea about Steam on Linux before Phoronix broke the news? Also, according to Michael Larabel, Ubuntu has worked out a gaming deal from a big publisher. These games may be available in Ubuntu Software Center later this year.

It seems, Canonical has plans to push Ubuntu as a gaming platform this year to increase mainstream adoption.

Source: Ubuntu Vibes

German developer Crytek sold 3 million copies of Crysis 2. Another 4 million copies were pirated, making it the most pirated game of 2011.

“It’s very flattering and upsetting at the same time,” Crytek’s director of creative development, Rasmus Højengaard, told CVG. “Obviously you miss so much revenue, it’s so clear that a lot of people want to play your game but they don’t really want to pay for it, which is unfortunately really disappointing.”

“It’s also a little flattering because people are willing to bother download these 10GB files or whatever the game takes because they think it looks great. We obviously want to avoid that this time, but even if we can convert 25 percent of those gamers into paying customers [you have an extra million sales].”

The thing about piracy that is often left unsaid is that not all of those pirated copies would convert into game sales even if we could eradicate piracy entirely. 4 million pirated copies of a game is not the equivalent of 4 million lost sales, even if it may indeed represent lost revenue. This isn’t to either justify or condemn piracy – it’s a complicated issue that stems largely from a lack of trust – but simply to point out that sometimes combating piracy is not the best way to staunch the bleeding.

Which brings us to used games, another phenomenon Crytek would be happy to end if it could. Asked whether he’d like to see a used game blocking feature in next-gen consoles, Højengaard said:

“From a business perspective that would be absolutely awesome. It’s weird that [second-hand] is still allowed because it doesn’t work like that in any other software industries, so it would be great if they could somehow fix that issue as well.”

(…)

The inevitable end of used games is probably just around the corner. Why change anything on the console side of the equation when the problem will “self-correct” on its own?

As to used games themselves, I’d be pretty happy with a digital download service like Steam replacing discs altogether on consoles, used games included. I’d be much less happy with some sort of built-in mechanism that renders used games useless without activation. What if my console breaks and I need to replace it? Would I need to pay to activate all my old games if I wanted to use them on the new machine? From a consumer perspective it would most definitely not be awesome.

That being said, the GameStop business model is hardly laudable. Yes, gamers should be allowed to sell their own games, but that doesn’t make GameStop an admirable middle-man for those transactions.

CVG’s Tom Ivan thinks that Crytek “would have received a great deal more revenue, were it not for second-hand game sales and piracy.” But it’s impossible to say if an end to used game sales would increase new game sales any more than an end to piracy would. People might simply buy fewer games, or fewer new releases.”

Source: Forbes

And another quote here:

@michaellarabel
#valve does have Linux games coming plus other very positive Linux plans… I’ll briefly post some screenshots and such tonight.

And even more info here.

This one is interesting, Valve is trying to charge morons and jerks more for their games, nice people would pay less or play for free even.

In a podcast interview with Seven Day Cooldown, summarized by Develop, Valve Boss Gabe Newell discusses the payment model for upcoming strategy game DOTA 2.:

“The issue that we’re struggling with quite a bit is something I’ve kind of talked about before, which is how do you properly value people’s contributions to a community?”

“…the games industry has this broken model, which is one price for everyone. That’s actually a bug, and it’s something that we want to solve through our philosophy of how we create entertainment products".

“An example is – and this is something as an industry we should be doing better – is charging customers based on how much fun they are to play with. So, in practice, a really likable person in our community should get Dota 2 for free, because of past behaviour in Team Fortress 2. Now, a real jerk that annoys everyone, they can still play, but a game is full price and they have to pay an extra hundred dollars if they want voice.” 

And the latest news is that they are going beyond this crazy idea into seeing what’s actually possible:

“We’re trying to figure out ways so that people who are more valuable to everybody else [are] recognized and accommodated. We all know people where if they’re playing we want to play, and there are other people where if they’re playing we would [rather] be on the other side of the planet.”

"It’s just a question of coming up with mechanisms that recognize and reward people who are doing things that are valuable to other groups of people."

This sounds like a scary idea, what do you guys think? What if “nice people” would just resale Steam games to “trolls”? This just doesn’t look so great to me.

Source: /.

I can’t believe they finally did it. A lot of gamers were questioning why it wasn’t possible to access games in offline mode in Steam while an account was suspended or banned, but the real news is that you already can, Valve just never told anyone.

What’s more? Your games aren’t limited to offline mode.

While Valve doesn’t have a lot of legal lingo surrounding the use of their digital distribution service, they do make it known in the subscriber agreement consent form…

“Valve may terminate your Account or a particular Subscription for any conduct or activity that Valve believes is illegal, constitutes a Cheat, or which otherwise negatively affects the enjoyment of Steam by other Subscribers.”

One user put that clause to the test and was banned, however, he later found out that he wasn’t completely blocked out of accessing his games because of a recent policy update in Steam for account access, which has now been deemed as "account locking" instead of "account banning". According to a Steam volunteer moderator, he makes it clear that…

“Steam support stopped disabling Steam accounts a bit more than two months ago. This has been replaced with "account locking": you still have access to your games, but some restrictions are applied to your account (no trading, no cd key activation, no purchase allowed, etc.).”

He provides proof of this with screenshots of an account being banned but still having access to games in offline or online mode:

This means that gamers who have been banned either for fraudulent or nefarious purposes with the intent to use their Steam account for other activities other than gaming like an upstanding member of the interactive entertainment community, can still access the games they paid for.

There are simply restrictions added to the account but the content you paid for is content you still have access to.

Valve actually offers quite a bit of leeway in using their service, so getting banned is not something that’s particularly easy to do so long as you follow the rules. There are, however, some rare exceptions where tertiary license agreements are put into place for Steam games, particularly, EA’s games on Steam, where an EA EULA for a [now absent] product on Steam basically outlines the same sort of restrictions you would find on Origin. Of course, since it’s Steam, there’s no worries about "losing entitlements" or having third-party software scan your PC for you.

Valve’s head honcho, Gabe Newell, recently spoke out against these sort of practices that EA is using for Origin, saying that as the service stands right now it’s just not up to par to where it should be for consumers and gamers, and it’s just not doing anything super-well at the moment. It’s kind of hard to argue against that point.

At least gamers who went off the deep end and managed to get banned can still play their games and access the content on both Steam and Origin. So, in that regards, it’s a win-win situation for gamers no matter which digital distribution service you use.

However Steam’s official support representative has stated that:

“Games registered to suspended accounts will no longer be accessible; even in offline mode."

Of course, the support didn’t clarify if this applies retroactively for suspended accounts or the distinction between a suspended account or a locked account, so we’re awaiting official word from Valve on the matter.

Source: Cinemablend

“Gabe Newell denied meeting Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple in a recent podcast with Seven Day Cooldown, but that’s not all he said. He also mentioned that DOTA 2 will be free-to-play, but with a twist.

“It’s going to be free-to-play — it’ll have some twists, but that’s the easiest way for people to think about it,” he revealed.

“The issue that we’re struggling with quite a bit is something I’ve kind of talked about before, which is how do you properly value people’s contributions to a community?,” he mentioned when asked about what kind of “twist ” players can expect from the game.

“We’re trying to figure out ways so that people who are more valuable to everybody else [are] recognized and accommodated.

“We all know people where if they’re playing we want to play, and there are other people where if they’re playing we would  be on the other side of the planet.

“It’s just a question of coming up with mechanisms that recognize and reward people who are doing things that are valuable to other groups of people,” he added.

He said that the free-to-play model Valve has in mind for DOTA 2 is completely unique and hasn’t been done before.

“When you start thinking about the different games that people play and you try to think about how people can create value or a service in one game and benefit somebody in a different game, you can start to see how the different games sort knit together,” Newell said.

“[You can see] how somebody who really likes Team Fortress 2 (TF2) can still be creating value for somebody who is playing DOTA 2 or Skyrim, or if somebody is a creator in one space how it can translate into another.

“In a sense, think of individual games as instance dungeons of a larger experience, if that makes sense as a concept.”

Tell us what you think in the comments section below.”

Source: Gaming Bolt